The words belong to American poet Emma Lazarus and were written in 1883 to raise money for the construction of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. They still inspire. Certainly, they’re a lot more poetic (and humane) than “build the wall and make Mexico pay for it.”

Canada has its own refugee issues — but they remain ‘issues’, not ‘crises.’ Yesterday, the federal government announced it would resettle 1,200 Yazidi refugees; 400 have already arrived. Singled out for murderous persecution by ISIS, the Yazidis undoubtedly are among the most vulnerable asylum seekers in the world right now.

Canada does not have a refugee crisis. We’ve been lucky on that score. This week, 74 bodies washed up on the shore of Libya — desperate North Africans who had been abandoned by their ruthless people-smugglers. The United Nations is predicting hundreds of thousands of children will go hungry as famine strikes Somalia and Yemen.

These sobering headlines put the illegal border crossings between Vermont and Quebec, and between Minnesota and Manitoba, into perspective. That’s not to say we don’t have a problem. Over Christmas, Somalian asylum seekers suffered extreme frostbite crossing the unprotected border in the dead of winter. They seemed convinced that the loss of a few digits would be a small price to pay for making it safely into Canada. The journey is dangerous. If this trend continues, somebody will end up freezing to death.

Then there’s the issue of resources. Emerson, Manitoba is a tiny community, an unincorporated hamlet of less than 700 residents. It is doing its best to shelter, feed and clothe asylum seekers — but good intentions can only go so far.

Clement insisted that Canadian law must be enforced. But that’s what the RCMP has been doing.

There is a bit of a legal quagmire here. The 2004 Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement forbids anyone who has made an asylum claim in the U.S. from making one in Canada, and vice versa. Canada considers our neighbour to the south to be a ‘safe haven’ for migrants and rejects the premise than anyone needs to ‘escape’ from the United States. That premise is being called into question more and more often lately, as the Trump administration attempts to ban travellers from seven predominately Muslim countries and more recently announced aggressive measures to deport “illegals” who have been convicted (and in some cases only charged) with criminal offences (not necessarily felonies).

With President Trump fighting with the courts over refugee claims, you can assume the Immigration and Refugee Board will be reluctant to order deportation if it means leaving migrants in legal limbo.

Under the law, asylum seekers who attempt to enter Canada at a Canada/U.S. border crossing must be turned back by CBSA. But if an asylum seeker makes it into Canada, somehow — say, by walking miles through woods — he or she will be arrested by the RCMP, transferred to the CBSA and then released pending an Immigration and Refugee Board Hearing. That’s the law: If you make it in somehow, you will get a hearing, but it you arrive at the border, you will be turned back.

Most successful refugee claims are made from outside of Canada. These ‘resettled refugees’ are generally sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or by private charities and churches. Most recently-admitted Syrian refugees came here under this process.

So it’s the law that is the problem, not the enforcement. While an asylum seeker is still in the United States, the RCMP has no jurisdiction. Once an asylum seeker illegally crosses the border, he or she is in Canada and has rights, including the right to a hearing.

Simply being able to make a claim is no guarantee that the claim will be successful, of course. Theoretically, the Third Country Agreement should still apply and the applicant should be returned to the ‘safe’ country. But deporting somebody who’s already in the country is infinitely more complicated than turning back someone who arrives at the border. With President Trump fighting with the courts over the suspension of the processing of refugee claims, you can assume the Immigration and Refugee Board will be reluctant to order deportation if it means leaving migrants in legal limbo.

The NDP is calling on the Trudeau government to scrap the Safe Third Country Agreement. That would solve at least one problem by eliminating the incentive to make a dangerous overland crossing. It might also amount to picking a fight with Trump, as it would imply that while America may be “great”, it’s not “safe”. On the other hand, Trump might welcome the move, as it would allow him to take credit for exiling of thousands of refugees he never wanted in the first place.

But by solving one problem, dumping the treaty would create another one — a political one. It would trigger a spike in refugee claims at the border. The Trudeau government has expressed a preference for sponsored refugees from Syria and Yazidis from Iraq. Canada has a limited ability to settle and integrate refugee claimants. Asylum seekers are only one class of migrant; the more of them we take in, the fewer we can accept from other refugee classes.

There are no easy answers. Sovereign nations have control of their own borders. The current influx of illegal crossings is creating the dangerous impression that Canada no longer has that control.

And we can’t ignore the role that party politics is playing in this. The Conservative Party of Canada is in the midst of a leadership contest that has seen several candidates take controversial stands on immigration and Islamophobia. It’s only a matter of time before some bright spark demands that we build a wall on the Canada-U.S. border — and make Trump pay for it.

That would be an amusing irony, but it wouldn’t help the situation on the ground. Abandoning the Safe Third Country Treaty system and establishing a system that provides for the fair and orderly processing of claims, while allowing for security screening, might be the best out of a great many imperfect solutions.

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